About HTML → Plain Text

Strip tags, decode entities, preserve paragraph breaks. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the HTML collection.

Use Cases

• Content migrators extracting text from legacy HTML pages
• Email developers previewing plain-text fallbacks for HTML emails
• Developers stripping HTML tags from CMS content for search indexing
• Data engineers cleaning scraped HTML for NLP and text analysis pipelines

Tips

• Paste raw HTML and get clean text with paragraph breaks preserved
• Entities like & and < are automatically decoded to real characters
• Use it to extract readable content from email HTML templates

Fun Facts

• HTML entities were introduced in HTML 2.0 (1995). There are 2,231 named character references in the HTML5 specification, from & to ​.
• The <p> tag has been part of HTML since Tim Berners-Lee's original 1991 specification — it is one of only 18 tags in the very first version of HTML.
• Plain text extraction from HTML is a deceptively hard problem — libraries like Mozilla's Readability (used in Firefox Reader View) use heuristics to handle edge cases.

FAQ

What gets stripped and what's kept?

All tags are removed; visible text is kept. Paragraph breaks become blank lines, headings keep their text but lose their size, lists become hyphen-prefixed lines. Scripts and styles are discarded entirely.

Does it preserve links?

Optional — toggle 'keep links' to append URLs inline like `text (https://example.com)`. Leave off for pure prose output.

How does it handle tables?

Tables are rendered as pipe-separated lines with header underlines. For complex tables the output degrades gracefully — the text is still readable.

Is this useful for email plain-text alternatives?

Exactly the primary use case — generate the text/plain MIME part of a marketing email from the HTML version. Also useful for readability metrics and word counts.